Want To Quit Smoking And Don't Know How? Just Stop, New Study Says

Trending News: New Study Confirms This Is The Best Way To Quit Smoking

Why Is This Important?

Because maybe you need to throw out all those fancy patches and mouth sprays.

Long Story Short

A new study shows that people who want to quit smoking are more likely to succeed if they go "cold turkey" by stopping abruptly.

Long Story

There are that many treatments for quitting smoking, you sometimes wonder why so many people continue with the habit. Well, it might be because despite all those treatments — all the patches and the gums and the mouth sprays — none of them are as good as going cold turkey.

That’s right: people who want to quit smoking are more likely to succeed if they just stop, a study in Annals of Internal Medicine claims. Volunteers who used this approach were 25 percent more likely to remain abstinent six months down the track than the smokers who tried to gradually wean themselves off instead.

The study was conducted by the British Heart Foundation and randomly split 700 volunteers into two groups: one in which participants gradually reduced their smoking via nicotine treatments and a second that simply gave up smoking immediately.

After six months, 15 percent of the participants in the gradual-cessation group were abstinent compared to 22 percent who quite abruptly. Lead researcher on the study, Oxford University’s Dr. Nicola Lindson-Hawley has a theory on the cold turkeys’ success: "The difference in quit attempts seemed to arise because [gradual quitters] struggled to cut down,” she told the BBC. “It provided them with an extra thing to do, which may have put them off quitting altogether.”

They’re interesting results, contradicting the findings listed on the American Cancer Society website, which say that only four to seven percent of people are able to quit smoking without medicine on any given attempt. The Society also quotes medical journals that report that about 25 percent of smokers who use medicines can stay smoke-free for over six months.